Panel #10 Session 2
Friday 1 December - 11:00
Building 25, Room 2
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​Chair: Daniel Juckes
Authors and the end of the world: The wellbeing impact of researching, writing and marketing climate fiction
- Alex Cothren, Rachel Hennessy & Amy Matthews
Flinders University & University of Melbourne
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There is a growing body of literature that studies the emotional impact of engaging regularly with climate change in a professional capacity, with a particular focus on climate scientists and conservationists. However, the experience of climate fiction writers is yet to be investigated, despite the many years such writers must spend deeply focusing on the climate change issue. This project fills this gap by interviewing 16 Australian and New Zealand writers of climate fiction, focusing on how the different stages of the publishing cycle — research, writing and marketing — affected their wellbeing. While there was a diversity of experiences, we have identified a number of trends. Despite some confronting moments, the research and writing phases represented a positive experience, with writers gaining a sense of control and usefulness in the face of the immense climate change problem. For many writers, though, the post-publication phase produced more difficult emotions, including feelings of guilt over inaction in the face of the crisis, frustration at reader responses, and pressure at being construed as climate change experts in interviews and festival events. In the Anthropocene, the number of authors who find themselves compelled to engage with these issues is ever increasing, including young and emerging writers in university settings, and our research is therefore timely in considering the impact of writing into this difficult space.
Dr Alex Cothren is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction, and he has writing published in Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Griffith Review, Ruminate and Australian Book Review. He is an Associate Lecturer and Research Associate at Flinders University, where his research interests include ethics of satire, climate fiction, and arts and health policy.
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Dr Rachel Hennessy is the award-winning author of four novels: The Quakers (2008), The Heaven I Swallowed (2013), River Stone (2019) and Mountain Arrow (2020). She also publishes short fiction and creative nonfiction. She was a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Rachel’s research interests include creative writing pedagogy, posthumanism, and climate fiction.
Dr Amy Matthews is an award-winning author who publishes under the names Amy T Matthews, Amy Barry and Tess LeSue. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University and Deputy Director of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. Amy has two books out in 2023: Amy T Matthews' Someone Else's Bucket List and Amy Barry's Marrying Off Morgan McBride. Amy's research interests are in genre fictions: popular romance, historical fiction, and fictions of climate change.
Two months on foot: walking toward an ecopoetics of landscape and soundscape
- Thomas Simpson
Deakin University
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This paper explores the creative and conceptual outcomes from walking two months end-to-end on Western Australia’s Bibbulmun Track. The experience of walking through landscapes/soundscapes and the methodical step-by-step accumulation of knowledge reflects the experimental nature of creative practice; we reach dead ends, double back, and revisit places to create new experiences. Building on a body of work that draws on walking experiences to create written and sounded work, this paper contributes to an ecopoetics of landscape and soundscape informed by the methods of practice-led research and phenomenology. Situated within a contemporary poetic discourse, this ecopoetic practice demonstrates how the body and the sense can contribute to an engaging and informed representation of place and experience.
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Thomas Simpson is a poet and sound artist based in Western Australia. He is completing a PhD at Deakin University combining poetry, walking, and soundscape ecology in south-west WA. His first collection of poetry Bone Picker was published in 2022 by Ginninderra Press and shortlisted for the 2023 WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer.
Talking in language like rain
- Michelle Symes
University of South Australia
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'In our coming together, respecting our differences, we can make rain….'¹
Rivers are dying. Derbarl Yerrigan Swan River, Western Australia is in need of health care.
In the last thirty years theorists have argued that water is “a repository of planetary memory.”² Humans are made up of water; we are four-fifths water in our body and brain. And like Rivers, we are drifts and rhythms of genetic memory, from relatively recent times to linear history, and then deeper still, into the “deep time cycles of ancestors and eons.”³
This presentation will map – it will be a ‘new’ nautical map – my exploration of compassion used to inform the development of my PhD novel, provisionally entitled ‘Dreams of Place’ and set by Derbarl Yerrigan. My approach, like all Rivers, is a falling through time and place, helped by feminist, humanist, posthumanist and Indigenous scholars: Martha Nussbaum, Astrida Neimanis, Rosi Braidotti and Bawaka et al. to Debra Dank. My approach is in directions of subjectivities that affirm difference, avoid universalising; that are inclusive, nomadic, watery; and are co-becomings of a deep quiet attending, like rain, quiet approaches of becoming in reconciliation and sustainability.
What if we spoke in the language of rain. Wrote this way too!
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1 Bawaka et al., “Gapu, water, creates knowledge and is a life force to be respected,” PLOS Water (April 2022): 6.
2 Jo Jones, “Introduction: Deep Maps,” in Four rivers, deep maps, ed. Jo Jones & Neil Curtis (Perth, UWA Publishing, 2022), 5.
3 Jones, “Introduction: Deep Maps,” 5.
Michelle Symes is a University of South Australia PhD candidate, whose been recognised as an emerging writer through a number of Western Australian programs (the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre, Varuna and Westerly). Michelle’s been short-listed and long-listed for Australia short story competitions. She’s been published in Westerly and the Review of Australian Fiction. Michelle is writing a novel exploring themes of compassion and belonging in Australia navigated through lens of family, botany, archaeology and the Derbarl Yerrigan Swan River.
She has a background in journalism (The Age, AAP), documentary creation and corporate communication. She lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.